When was fun banished from Batman’s world? Certainly the tide turned with “The Dark Knight Returns,” Frank Miller’s 1986 series of comics. As exciting as they were, Miller’s books enshrined a claustrophobic, dystopian approach that has smothered many subsequent screen treatments.
In the immediate aftermath of the books, the Tim Burton films “Batman” and “Batman Returns” found thrills in the darkness. But when I sit through the subsequent Christopher Nolan blockbusters, or Todd Phillips’s “The Joker,” or even Matt Reeves’s recent reboot film, “The Batman,” I feel as if I were being punished for not being a serious enough (or depressed enough) viewer.
Reeves (“Dawn of the Planet of the Apes”) is a very talented director, and “The Batman” was easier to sit through than some of its ballyhooed predecessors. But it was ruinously long at three hours, its small store of familiar ideas about revenge and social decay running dry well before the movie ended. And Reeves’s Batman was such a stone-faced mope that poor Robert Pattinson spent the whole movie looking as if he were wondering where the bathroom was, not that he would have been any happier had he found it.
But the movie was beautifully shot, and Zoë Kravitz was the latest in a line (Julie Newmar, Eartha Kitt, Michelle Pfeiffer) of great Catwomen. And it had an odd, sideshow-like bonus: a beautiful movie star, Colin Farrell, rendering himself unrecognizable under a reported 50 pounds of latex to play a battered, ugly, all too human variation on a classic villain, the Penguin. The performance wasn’t fun, exactly, but it was definitely something to look at.
Now Farrell and his latex are back in “The Penguin,” an HBO series spun off from “The Batman.” (It premiered on Thursday night; its second episode will not appear until Sept. 29.) Even though the show is set in the immediate aftermath of the film, and the story features large-scale chaos, Batman is nowhere to be seen; apparently he’s taking a long vacation. So “The Penguin” is not a superhero show.
Instead, as developed by Lauren LeFranc (“Impulse,” “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”) with Reeves as an executive producer, it is a particularly self-conscious gangster saga. Farrell’s Oswald Cobb (shortened from Cobblepot) is a midlevel mobster who sees an opportunity when his boss is killed and sets out to take over the Gotham City drug trade, peddling a new high called Bliss. Alternately opposed to him or allied with him is the boss’s daughter, Sofia Falcone (Cristin Milioti), recently released from Arkham Asylum with designs of her own on the top spot.
“The Penguin” sets itself up for lofty comparisons, invoking a gamut of gangster tales from “The Godfather” to “Scarface” to “The Sopranos.” (It reaches even farther back: Oswald gets a Jimmy Cagney moment, telling his girlfriend, “Top of the world.”) And LeFranc studiously maps out the psychological and familial landscape.
Oswald, a fatherless mama’s boy who has been ridiculed and underestimated his entire life, becomes a father figure to Victor (Rhenzy Feliz), a young immigrant from the poor part of Gotham that was flooded at the end of “The Batman.” Sofia, frozen out of the business and discarded because she’s a woman, is as brutal to her own family as she is to her rivals. Oswald strives for redemption and recognition, Sofia seeks validation, and Victor chases the American dream while trying to hold onto his innocence.
It sounds fine on paper, and based on the glowing notices the show has been receiving, people are reviewing that outline rather than what’s actually onscreen. Because everything about “The Penguin” feels mechanical and recycled, constructed rather than imagined. Mob-movie clichés about honor and service are recited in lifeless dialogue and then recited again; the action often undercuts them but not in any witty or exciting way. The characters’ fortunes swing back and forth, and faceless villains kill off one another in rounds that feel like brackets of a tournament in which you don’t know the teams. And as with “The Batman,” duration — nearly eight full hours — makes it harder to stay interested.
“The Penguin” wants to be more than a comic-book series — to say something about inequity and violence and climate change and the effects of reflexive dishonesty on the soul — but it is also more than willing to swim in the shallow end of the storytelling pool. So while there are few if any real surprises, there are jolts, violent plot turns designed to shock and to deepen the emotional stakes. In the bleak, shallow context of the story, they play less as tragedy than as an off-putting moral vacuity.
Cruising through all of this — not with the Penguin’s typical waddle but with a loping, aggressive limp that recalls Hollywood’s peg-legged sailors — is Farrell, who gives a modulated, fully committed, entirely professional performance. But it’s not a Colin Farrell performance. Adopting a grating New York-ish accent, he does a meticulous job of channeling gangster icons like De Niro, Pacino and Gandolfini.
And then there’s the makeup job, which, with its deep scars, pasty skin and atrocious hair, is impressive in its own right. Stars can count on being praised for uglifying themselves like this, but there is no virtue to it here. I kept thinking of how the Penguin’s lines would gain a lilt, a wit, a touch of romance or rue, or a frisson of genuine terror if they were coming out of the actual face of the wonderfully expressive performer speaking them. Farrell proves that he can do something different at the expense of his own best qualities as an actor.
If the idea was that ugly within equals ugly without, it’s not exactly a profound thought. Why not ugly within, glamorous and seductive without? Now that could be fun.
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